“The length of our marriage is 102 years, and we have 87 years left. After 87 years you can marry some else. But within these 87 years, you cannot change your mind.” Such was Jack Ma’s blessing at a mass wedding for Alibaba employees on May 9 in Hangzhou, just three [...]

In today’s context of highly competitive environment, Organizations are always in the mode of adopting various practices for high employee satisfaction and retention. Organizations tend to collect feedback from employees in m...

It’s a normal practice that organizations are in look out for good employees. Likewise employees are also on look out for great organizations. What does employees look in organizations? Or simply, what makes an Organization as “Employer of Choice”?﻿

It’s a normal practice that organizations are in look out for good employees. Organizations look for qualifications, skills, experience, expertise, attitude and fitment of prospective employee to the job position and culture ...

The question driving many technology transformations is: 'What can we do to make people do the right thing?'

Changing the question to one that focuses on realising potential can reveal radically different insights into how to achieve goals. For example, the answers and engagement are very different when you ask instead:"what do our people need to better deliver on our goals?"

A large part of the history of our technology has been the effort to use technology to control human behaviour. Technology transformation is often sold on the potential to better make humans do things that they should be doing. The failure of so many transformational technology programs is proof that human behavioural changes are a subtler and more elusive challenge. Changing the conversation is as important as changing the process.
The Busine...

About this community

We're currently standing at a crossroads. The 20th century ways of doing business are failing us due to the rapid pace of innovation. Companies are dying out quicker only to be replaced by others. We need to look for better ways to work and use that knowledge to build better places to work. Agile software development, Cynefin, Lean and systems thinking have all started moving us in a good direction and are things that can be built on.
My hope is that we can bring together people from disparate fields to discuss better ways of working. Fields such as technology, evolution, psychology, education and neuroscience to name but a few. By combining our insights and looking at our own failures and successes, we can hopefully move forwards.
Image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/qstreetdc/8017082/

moderator

So work is going collaborative and interdisciplinary. Karen uses a lovely metaphor to get people to consider other ways of seeing, in the context of projects. You might call it "Neighbors & Fences".

"Peeking over a fence" means opening yourself up to a person's viewpoint when it differs from yours. You can do that as a first step. Then you could get closer to the fence, say hi across the fence, and maybe even chat across the fence! And then you might get bold and jump over the fence.

"Over the fence" happens to be the name of Karen's company - http://overthefence.com.de/. They create technologies for better projects, the first of which is the Project Canvas, a visual tool which can be used to compare how different stakeholders see and understand a joint project. It can serve to let people "get on the same page" much earlier in the lifecycle of the project.

Karen has been growing a group of people who use the Project Canvas. I'm going to start playing with it and report back...

The lines have blurred between work hours and personal time. In our newest infographic, Winding Down the Work Week, explore the changes in businesses around the world as the 40-hour work week continues its shift toward the workplace of the future. Work emails, schedules and documents are accessible (even editable) on mobile devices, bringing the workplace to anywhere with an Internet connection. But does working more hours mean more productivity?...

moderator

I often struggle to find content on #FutureWork (or, whatever you call it). Does anyone have any decent links to blogs, feeds, twitter accounts etc that you follow that provides regular content?

I spend time trawling Psychology sites, or HR sites (sometimes that's hard work!), but am never truly satisfied. I find it hard to believe that the future of work is such a small community on the web, it's more likely that I just cannot find it!

Either that, or we are at the tipping point and it's our job to push it over!﻿

What if you had a community that had no titles and no one in charge. How would things get done? How would you ensure needs are met? Gangplank is such a community and people there have learned a lot about real merit-based leadership.﻿

people of a certain mindset expound on how job creators need to be cared for so we all might enjoy the benefits of employmentyou know what curtails new enterprises from outperforming these traditional businesses -- subsidies paid by those who actually pay our taxes and laws/regulations favoring the already wealthy and their corporations﻿

moderator

I write about a study which reports the findings that surface acting in meetings makes the meeting to be perceived as less valuable. Surface acting also causes the actor to report higher feelings of burnout or emotional stress.﻿

Mike Pearce: Indeed, Ideally one would not 'act' at all. But I think it is situationally pruident (practical) due to the vast variety of expectations different sub-cultures have, and some are not yet and may never be tolerant of other cultures and so may be strongly offended or become reactive if one simply doesn't act at all when in their company.﻿

owner

I love this post by community members +Gideon Rosenblatt. The following is my comment on the op:

"I totally think of an organization as a type of life. As you point out, they are complex adaptive systems. i.e. they are more than a sum of their parts. That said, they are far from human. As we've spoke about before, I believe that l size is an important factor as to how human an organization can be. Technology can enable us to give a small group of people a very large megaphone. If we are able to keep that size small, the organization will more likely be able to retain it's humanity. It was pointed out to me recently that when we get to unrestrained growth, the nearest analogy is that of a cancer. All types of organisms have an optimal size for their environment, but we also have a diversity of organism types too. I see that a company, based on it's environment, has an optimal size. That size might change as it evolves, but not rapidly (though individual parts might change rapidly internally). Companies are getting smaller and hence more human. Perhaps it'll eventually collapse down to the single digits one day. Perhaps as tech improves and companies get smaller, they become more intelligent (though not quite sentient)."

"One final edit, we seem to be slowly shifting our language away from the industrial age mechanism model to an organism model. Machines are soulless things. We can't keep on applying the rigidity of the machine over a living system."

Are Organizations Alive?Is the evolution of technology transforming organizations into a new form of life? And if so, what role will humans play?

With each passing year, organizations act more and more like living entities thanks to the evolution of technology. In this brand new piece, I ask some provocative questions that have been gnawing at me for some time now. This article represents a shift in the focus of my writing. But if you read it, you will see that it ultimately still ties back to the need to build businesses and other organizations in ways that stand for something more than just the quest for profit. In this sense, this piece just raises the stakes for doing that.

This is a hypothesis, and so I am very interested in feedback on the ideas outlined here. No one knows the future.

Thanks for the comment, +Gerardine Rudolphy. I just purchased a copy of that paper, thanks to your pointer.

The problem with working with these newly emerging systems, is that they exhibit some attributes that are vaguely familiar because of their human elements. But they are much more than that and so they also exhibit attributes that require a different lens to understand them. That is the journey I'm now setting out on.

Here's some of the abstract on that article by the way. Thanks again for the pointer:

========Purpose – Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to gods, plants, animals or inanimate objects (the wind, rocks, etc.). This paper sets out to disprove the association of anthropomorphic characteristics with individual organizations.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses anthropomorphism in organization theory because many scholars argue that organizations are human or like human beings. Some examples of “An organization called Harry” in organization literature are presented.

Findings – Three causes of anthropomorphism can be traced. The negative, rather than any positive, consequences of anthropomorphism in organization literature are discussed.﻿

owner

Everyday we tell each other, and reinforce, the stories of our current reality and weave a tapestry of a greater narrative. I believe we should be telling new stories of the future of work and weaving our own tapestry. What stories are you hearing or telling on this subject?﻿

"We use the term "maker movement" for a reason. A movement implies a shared view that is motivating people to participate and collaborate. Overall, participants in the maker movement share a vision of nothing less than changing the world, "freeing the worker" from the rote and unempowered work of corporations and into doing something fulfilling and creative that may well transcend the profit motive."﻿